Henri Matisse

The most comprehensive exhibition ever held of the work of the French master Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Henri Matisse: A Retrospective comprises more than 400 works which together reveal the exceptional range and depth of the artist's work. The exhibition offers the opportunity for a reassessment of both Matisse's career and the critical role his work plays in the history of twentieth-century art. Matisse is fully revealed not only as a painter of scenes of primal beauty, but as one whose art rests on a foundation of extraordinary visual intelligence and rigorous discipline.The retrospective, which can only be seen in New York, draws extensively on the four most important, and mutually complementary, Matisse collections in the world, those of The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is thus able to represent Matisse's most innovative period, from Fauvism through the experimental years, more thoroughly than ever before. By joining these four collections with masterworks from numerous other private and public collections throughout the world, the exhibition is expanded to encompass Matisse's entire career.